Meet Aisha Muharrar, the Star Writer on Parks and Recreation

One of the biggest questions hanging over the 2014 Emmys is whether NBC’s Parks and Recreation, which has been nominated eleven times but has yet to win, will finally take home an award. Amy Poehler is nominated in the Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series category for the fifth time, and her prospects have never looked better—the show is coming off a strong season in which Poehler’s character, Leslie Knope, left her beloved parks department, became a mother of triplets, and even high-fived Michelle Obama.

But with the sitcom now producing its seventh and final season, the more pressing question around Hollywood seems to be what’s in store for one of the show’s major behind-the-scenes talents, Aisha Muharrar. A graduate of Harvard and former vice president of the Harvard Lampoon, Muharrar, 30, joined Parks and Rec during its second season in 2009, after a brief stint as a writer on Sit Down, Shut Up. As she worked her way from staff writer to co-executive producer, Muharrar has been credited with playing a pivotal role in shaping the show’s sunny brand of comedy with a warm writing style her peers have described as “funny with heart.”

On a recent morning, though, Muharrar was not thinking about her spot in the annals of comedy history—she was thinking about Parks and Rec. It was a shoot day, and she was eager to finish her breakfast smoothie and get to work. “Every time even a small detail comes up this season, like ordering lunch, I want to memorialize it,” said Muharrar, seated in the living room of her Silver Lake, Los Angeles, apartment, surrounded by Leslie Knope coffee mugs and other paraphernalia from the show. “I’ll think, this is the last time I’m going to be doing this.”

As it happens, when the filming (and memorializing) is over, Muharrar will be developing her own show. The details of the project are under wraps—she won’t divulge any specifics—but it’s a safe bet that it will carry on the cheery humor for which Muharrar is known. “A lot of comedy comes from a mean, cynical, angry place,” she said. “I’d like to continue the trend of humane and decent people being funny. It’s more of a challenge and it makes you feel better about the world as a viewer.”

Close viewers of Parks and Rec can find traces of Muharrar in the show’s protagonist, and as a self-described good girl who loves giving gifts and eating waffles, Muharrar admits that she does identify with Leslie Knope. “I definitely get where [Leslie] is coming from and can relate to that character,” she said. “Not so much with Ron Swanson. I’m a pescatarian from Long Island.” Of Muharrar’s contributions to the show, Poehler said in an email, “Aisha has this real sense of justice. She’s a peaceful warrior. Her scripts on Parks and Rec are always funny and touching and whipsmart, just like her.” (Poehler also said, “I’m hoping to produce something with Aisha in the future.”)

Muharrar says she honed her style of comedy by taking cues from the women around her, rattling off a list of her comedic heroes: “my mom, women on the Harvard Lampoon, Amy [Poehler], Gilda Radner, Lily Tomlin, Ellen DeGeneres, Rosie O’Donnell, Wanda Sykes, Julia Louis-Dreyfus.” Realizing how many names had flown off her tongue, she added, “Women have been killing it in comedy for a really long time!” On this much-discussed subject, Muharrar says she doesn’t believe so much in the buzz that comediennes are having a new moment, rather that the momentum is a result of female comedy writers acting onscreen. It wasn’t until Tina Fey, who had been writing for Saturday Night Live for a while, moved in front of the camera as an anchor on “Weekend Update” that she became a force, Muharrar points out. Mindy Kaling and Lena Dunham, too, are writers who act. “It’s the hyphenate of writer-celebrity that has put women writers in the recent spotlight, but it’s not super shocking to me that women can write, produce, and act,” Muharrar said. “I don’t think of this as just a right-now trend.”

Muharrar herself has appeared on camera—in a short she wrote, “Black Best Friend,” Adam and Naomi Scott’s “The Greatest Event in Television History,” and an episode of Parks and Rec—but says she feels most at home in the writers’ room. “Before I was a staff writer, I heard about the idea that writing rooms were filled with smoke and good old boys making crude Mad Men–era jokes, but my reality of being a TV writer has not been like that in the slightest,” she said. “I’ve never been the only woman writer on a show. They’re everywhere.” She views comedy writing as a meritocracy, because laughing is an involuntary response. “Whoever is funniest is funniest.”

In the short term, Muharrar is rooting for Poehler to pull in an Emmy, of course. “It’s sort of a Susan Lucci situation,” she said, referring to the actress who won her first Emmy after 19 nominations. “But Jon Hamm hasn’t won an Emmy either.”